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Month: June 2018

Profanity laden but Jonathan Pie sums up what CM has long held about the divisiveness of identity politics and the unnecessary lengths corporates go to politicize products when all customers want to do is to consume what they’re actually paying for.

Third time lucky? According to The Hill, former VP Joe Biden took the top spot in a Harvard CAPS/Harris poll conducted this month for 2020 Democratic Party presidential candidates, with 32% of the vote. Hillary Clinton was named the Democrats’ second best option, with 18%. Socialist Bernie Sanders, at 76 years old, came in third, with 16%. Senator Elizabeth Warren took 10%.

If the Dems can’t come up with a fresh candidate to challenge there is little hope in wresting the White House away from the GOP in 2020. Such is the level of internal ructions, Schumer & Pelosi were forced to publicly denounce Waters for suggesting people harass Trump officials in the street. As written yesterday in ‘Staring at the Dictator – redux’ trying to encourage voters to back a party that screams white noise incessantly is unlikely to succeed in converting the masses.

In Feb 2017, CM wrote a piece titled ‘Staring at the Dictator’ which highlighted that winning hearts and minds comes from sensible and reasonable dialogue. Not from widespread activism where the sole purpose is to shut down debate. Hasn’t the left learnt that physically and verbally bullying people senseless and mocking them for their supposed ignorance doesn’t work? Yet they still keep screaming the same hypo-ventilated bile, as Robert Reich has below. Nothing would make CM happier if democracy does its job in any country. If we believe he speaks for the majority, he has absolutely nothing to fear. No need for protests of any kind. Yet he shouldn’t blame the constituents for overthrowing bad governments who believe in divine incumbency. Blame bad policy.

If Democrats hadn’t treated the last election as a coronation then perhaps Hillary Clinton may have got her wish. Things had obviously become so bad at the grass roots level that the establishment was rejected. Even after all of the p*ssy grabbing allegations had been brought to light, Trump still won. His vulgarity was on the ballot. His “no one respects women more than I do” lie after this revelation in the 2nd debate was broadcast to 100s of millions. It was also on the ticket. Despite his supposed racist demagoguery, he got a higher proportion of black and Hispanic voters than either McCain or Romney. Don’t hate the player, hate the game. These are facts, as much as we may not like what they portend.

The #whitelash arguments don’t rub either because the same people voted a black man in twice. Clinton didn’t lose because she was a woman. She lost in part because she ran on the basis she was a woman. Surveys may show that Republican voters don’t want a female president however should Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley run in 2024 she would win their support on the basis of her strength, not her gender or her Native American/Sikh heritage. Ability should be all that matters. Clinton’s constant griping 18 months after her loss shows just how poor a president she would have made. It is so bad even Rasmussen reports that a majority of Democrats don’t think she would have been any better than Trump. Take that!

If Trump loses legitimately (assuming he runs) in 2020 then so be it. In the last 1.5 years in office, American citizens have had plenty of time to weigh him in their own minds, regardless of the media’s relentless onslaught of over-the-top sensationalist click-baiting. If citizens feel he has delivered in areas that affected them on a personal level, they’re probably on balance willing to vote for the same again unless the alternative offers something better. At the same time they have had plenty of time to weigh the Democrats. They’ve seen first hand the bitterness at the State of the Union plastered on the faces of Pelosi et al. They’ve heard Maxine Waters call to her supporters to gang up on the staff in the current administration. They’ve seen countless Hollywood celebrities chant vile hate from celebrating the decapitation of the President, calling Ivanka a “feckless c*nt” to hoping 12yo Barron is ripped from Melania’s arms and caged with pedophiles. Democrat supporters have gone so far as to shoot GOP politicians. CM is quite sure that however horrid the President may be, these are hardly the types of antics that will sway opinion of the swing voters to join the self-appointed ‘righteous’ like Reich. And no, not all Democrats think like this much like many Republicans don’t endorse stupidity from their own. It lets down both sides.

Republicans or swing voters do not respond well to being called intolerant, cruel, racist, misogynist, xenophobic or climate sceptics without fact or basis. Since when does one consciously vote for others over their own needs? It isn’t selfish. If one is buried under onerous tax legislation, red tape or financial destitution do they vote to put the interests of others above their own? No. As a long term Liberal Party (aka conservatives) voter in Australia, the current party has ‘left’ me. I didn’t leave them. They did not win my vote last election. It must be earned. They don’t represent my values. It didn’t take tribal beltings to force me to a conclusion. Nor negative media to discover it. Yet somehow the activists believe that constant bleating will cause me to change my mind.

What would be nice is to see properly supported factual (not subjective rhetorical) evidence that 63mn Trump supporters are as one when it comes to all the claims they make. I would love to see the arguments in all their gore should they exist. Not a one off event. Happy to see where my own arguments hold deep flaws. Many Trump voters detest him on a moralistic level yet are happy to champion his achievements if they feel they get a direct benefit from them. So often claims are made to undermine his followers. Every time (and often) these assertions prove to be baseless, the journey to sway the other side to see reason gets thwarted even further. Time magazine issuing a confession over the photo-shopped cover of last week ended up at the bottom of a long article. It just shows just how unapologetic they are. Kathy Griffin was sorry until she wasn’t again. Talk about self serving.

To the comments made by Robert Reich today:

“My friends, this is a dark hour. Intolerance, cruelty, racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and environmental destruction have been let loose across the land.

Trump controls the Republican Party, the Republican Party controls the House and Senate, and the Senate and Trump will soon control the Supreme Court.

Republicans also control both chambers in 32 states (33 if you count Nebraska) and 33 governorships. And in many of these states they are entrenching their power by gerrymandering and arranging to suppress votes.

Yet only 27 percent of Americans are Republican, and the vast majority of Americans disapprove of Trump. The GOP itself is now little more than Trump, Fox News, a handful of billionaire funders, and evangelicals who oppose a woman’s right to choose, gay marriage, and the Constitution’s separation of church and state.

So what are we – the majority — to do?

First and most importantly, do not give up. That’s what they want us to do. Then they’d have no opposition at all.

Second, in the short term, if you are represented by a Republican senator, do whatever you can to get him or her to reject Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, or, at the least, postpone consideration until after the midterm elections. Urge others to join with you. 202-224-3121

Fourth, vote this November 6 for people who will stand up to all this outrage. Mobilize and organize others to do so. Contact friends and relations in “red” states, and urge them to do the same.

Fifth, help lay the groundwork for the 2020 presidential election, so that even if Trump survives Mueller and impeachment he will not be reelected.

Finally, know that this fight will be long and hard. It will require our patience, our courage, and our resolve. The stakes could not be higher.”

Perhaps what Reich fails to get is that he is almost backhanding his own supporters in his rant. It is more than likely that a majority of Republican (and no doubt many centrist Democrat) voters want the liberal left to give up because it has become nothing but white noise. The more they protest the more tuned out they become. Control of the Supreme Court? I encourage you to read the cake shop transcript where Associate Justice Sotomayor shows without a doubt she is a political activist, not a judge. It is embarrassingly obvious. The Supreme Court is only supposed to apply impartiality around current laws (or those at the time of the legal action), not make a song and dance about wish lists and try to piece a verdict around how nice it would be if things were different. She was trying to argue 2018 laws around a 2012 issue. One doesn’t have to be a lawyer to work that one out.

To the assertion that a handful of billionaire funders lean the GOPs way, he should reflect that most of the billionaires in America reside in blue states. In today’s world, the big corporations win more by backing Democrats because more onerous regulation benefits their ability to squeeze out the smaller competition thanks to red tape. Laissez faire? You’ve got to be kidding.

Perhaps in closing, the most compelling argument Reich makes is the one which stands out above all others – “we, the majority.” If he wants to stop Trump, he just needs the majority to vote on the shared basis of his beliefs – case closed. No need for protests. After all he says that Trump’s base is so small. If almost 3 years of negative spin on the sitting POTUS has failed to convince the majority, nothing will. Screaming in public may seem therapeutic to the masses but should the GOP win the mid-terms then Reich will prove just as out of touch as he was prior to the election.

Silence is golden. Let democracy take its course. Let us see whether the Russians consolidate their pick in the mid-terms…Putin has even more reason to ensure America sees more “red.”

It is hard not to think of NY Democrat voters following in the path of what got Jeremy Corbyn cemented as UK Labour leader. Those tired of the Blairite Tory-lite Labour Party of old swooped in on a hardline socialist agenda. Tory’s pretending to be liberals. No thanks, they cried. Democrat-Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AO-C) romped home in NY booting 10-term incumbent Joe Crowley out. While NY has long been a deep blue state, clearly Crowley wasn’t seen as progressive enough. As a disciple of Bernie Sanders, AO-C embodies the idea that the only way the Dems stand a chance is to offer a proper “hard” alternative. Free education, healthcare, open borders and rattling cages in Texas tickled voters pink. Right out of the Bernie Sanders’ playbook. Full credit to her for nailing the mood of the electorate. No one can blame her for that. She even hammered progressive NY Democrat Senator Kirsten Gillibrand for not backing her prior to the primary, tweeting,

“Unsurprising, but disappointing that @SenGillibrand didn’t even bother to talk to nor consider me before endorsing…You‘d think a progressive leader would at least be interested in how a no-corporate money Bronx Latina triggered the 1st NY-14 primary in 14 years on prog issues.”

She has a point. It isn’t that Nancy Pelosi and Maxine Waters aren’t left. It is just that they, like Gillibrand, appear to be frauds of the faith the party proclaims it instills. Pretending to have a socialist progressive agenda while living it large behind huge gated mansions and in the pockets of the lobbyists funded by the major corporates. AO-C appears the real deal. Better to be an authentic socialist. Democracy ironically delivered her win. No doubt she’ll trounce her GOP opponent.

While AO-C is at this stage a one-off, her success could well pave the way for a blue-print for winning the true heart of the Democrat voters. Apart from self-professing that she ticks a lot of the diversity boxes there is something refreshing about what she represents. That populism is not just reserved for bigoted and racist angry white male supremacists. However this has unintended consequences for further polarizing a country. We only need look at Sarah Huckabee Sanders being asked to leave the Red Hen restaurant and chased across the street. Then to have Maxine Waters encourage people to hound Trump administration officials out of restaurants or gas stations. Is this the America Americans want? Surely most are appalled by such behaviours.

We might laugh at such a notion as fringe but Rasmussen Reports noted yesterday, “Thirty-one percent (31%) of Likely U.S. Voters say it’s likely that the United States will experience a second civil war sometime in the next five years…59% of all voters are concerned that those opposed to President Trump’s policies will resort to violence, with 33% who are Very Concerned. This compares to 53% and 28% respectively in the spring of Obama’s second year in office.”

Miriam Webster Dictionary tweeted that “‘Socialism’ has been our top search (+1500%) since Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s primary win last night.” There is a touch of irony in a recent CIS survey of millennials which showed that 63% of university graduates were in favour of socialism despite more than half (51%) hadn’t heard of Chinese communist revolutionary Mao, responsible for as many as 45 million deaths during the ‘Cultural Revolution’. Similarly, 42% didn’t know of Lenin, the father of modern communism, or World War II Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, responsible for the deaths of up to 43 million people.

Of interest, such a wave of socialism delivered by AO-C will only serve to feed the mentality of the sharks that elected Trump. AO-C has exposed just how policy-lite the likes of Waters, Pelosi and Schumer are. They realise Trump will romp home in 2020 unless there is a real alternative. Whether we like to admit it or not, Trump still has the highest approval rating of any Western leader – Trudeau, May, Macron, Turnbull and Merkel included. Incumbent Democrats have only shown their jealousy. The previous State of the Union speech spoke volumes of the inane levels of bitterness.

Americans are sick and tired of self-serving politicians. They want policy not public shaming and grandstanding. They want to see action not the use of children for political purposes. Whatever the stance of Americans on illegal immigrants at the border, decades of inaction has led to the sorry state it is in.

Of course it is easy to point fingers at POTUS for his insensitivity yet how soon it is they forget he has issued an executive order to ban separation from parents. How they overlook that countless numbers of innocent children used by smugglers that have died as they were abandoned in the desert across the border by their ‘supposed’ parents once ‘compassion’ was granted. All this prior to Trump taking office. That 80% of illegal immigrant girls and women are sexually assaulted before reaching the border, according to HuffPo. Hardly the type of humanity anyone with a pulse wants to see.

The viral Time Magazine photo-shopped cover of a little girl crying was used with great effect by the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES) to raise $20mn via crowdfunding! $20 million!! Even after it was revealed that the child – stolen from her father – was never separated from the mother (who left her other 3 kids behind) and paid a smuggler to get to the border, RAICES still shamelessly uses the picture to boost its funding target to $25mn. That shows the power of just how willing Trump haters will go to support organizers with questionable ethics. Oh the irony of Democrat Chuck Schumer rejecting the very changes to the immigration laws they themselves put forward. At least AO-C seems to be walking the talk, however misguided her altruism may be.

Michael Moore correctly said before the 2016 election that “Trump is the Molotov cocktail in the system”. Despite his often vulgar methods, he has merely publicized long festering wounds created by decades of indifference. One can shout from the roof tops at record low unemployment, record financial markets and economic growth but beneath the surface poverty remains above that seen before the GFC and income disparity has never been wider. AO-C should be sending shivers down the spine of the DNC. The incumbents though the cost of derailing Bernie Sanders was a one off. Now AO-C has exposed just how shallow the status quo is. Maybe Nancy Pelosi summed her fears best herself,

“They made a choice in one district. So let’s not get yourself carried away as an expert on demographics and the rest of that. Within the caucus or outside the caucus, we are — again, we have an array of genders, generations, geography, and there is opinion in our caucus, and we’re proud of that. The fact that in a very progressive district in New York, it went more progressive than — Joe Crowley is a progressive, but she’s more left than Joe Crowley, is about that district...”

Not even Pelosi’s record breaking 8-hr speeches talking about the pride felt in her grandson wanting to be Hispanic will ever trump someone like AO-C whom seems to carry the liberal cause with the type of fervor that matches their social virtues. Populism indeed works both ways.

CM always said at the time of Trump’s election that the best outcome of his victory will be that it causes more people to deeply rethink about how much their vote truly counts. Democracy delivers. From the richest to the poorest, everyone has equal say. More politicians are slowly waking up from the slumber that incumbency in politics is no longer a given. That is a good thing, even if CM is not a fan of what AO-C supports. Then again that is a matter for American citizens alone to make, not CM’s.

Not a sight you see every day but hearty congratulations to the Koreans who defeated Germany 2-0 to send the reigning world champs to the bottom of their pool and out of the World Cup. The Germans looked wooden the whole match. The Korean goalie had a blinder. Korean defence seemed everywhere. Was it a case of Sth Africa vs Japan in the 2015 Rugby World Cup where the favorites treated the game as a formality? Certainly felt like that. When the German goalie left to play attacker the final goal summed up how embarrassing the match was. Not even 9minutes extra time could see the Germans penetrate the Korean goal line. It would have been nice to see the German side shake the hands of the Koreans to acknowledge the achievement rather than sit solemnly on the pitch and contemplate the lashing to be received in the press. Good sportsmanship is the sign of good champions.

More digital diplomacy from Israel to Iran. This time using Iran’s solid performance against Portugal in the World Cup. The last time digital diplomacy was used by the Israeli PM was to push free drip irrigation technology to prevent farmers suffering any more from drought. Bibi Netanyahu is a polarizing figure at home, but his message here seems to be resonating with Iranians too.